Sonora Carver, the blind daredevil of the diving horses, listened to the script for the movie about her life and snorted. More than once.
”Wrong,” she said, more than once, and the writer eventually went away, dejected.
Then she sat down to think it over. It was 1982. She was 77 and hadn`t ridden the back of a high-diving horse for more than 40 years. Disney Studios wanted to make a movie about her, and she was annoyed about some of the facts being fudged.
”But I sat there and gave myself a talking to,” she said, during an interview in her home in Pleasantville, N.J., near Atlantic City. ”I asked myself what I would think of this movie if I never rode a diving horse and never knew Sonora Carver.
”I decided it would make a `good` movie-not because I rode the horses and not because I`m blind. There are plenty of blind people around. It would be a good movie because it would tell young people and handicapped people that they can do things if they just make up their minds to do it.”
Sonora Carver is 87 now, and the movie about her life, ”Wild Hearts Can`t Be Broken,” opened earlier this year. (Walt Disney Pictures
representatives said that although the movie is no longer playing at major theaters in the Chicago area, it is is still in theatrical release.)
Anyone who remembers the glory days of Atlantic City`s Steel Pier in the 1940s and the diving horses jumping off a 40-foot-high platform into a tank of water probably saw her in action.
She is a little surprised that people are interested in her life story. She thinks it`s a pretty ordinary tale: Small-town girl from Georgia meets buffalo hunter-sharpshooter-dentist from the Great Plains and hits the road with his family for a career riding diving horses. Blinded in a jump gone wrong, she refuses to quit and carries on for another decade.
”The movie,” she said, ”tends to glamorize it.”
Sonora was 20 years old and had moved with her family from the small town in which she grew up to the big city of Savannah, Ga. One day in the fall of 1923, her mother saw a newspaper advertisement for a ”young woman good at swimming and diving.”
Seems W.F. Carver was in town with his diving horses.
She was working then as a department store sales clerk; her mother wanted her to get into show business.
”I refused to consider even meeting these people,” she recalled. ”They were show people, and my experience with show people in my home town was that they wore makeup, overdressed and spoke too loudly in public.”
But her mother nagged her until Sonora finally agreed to talk with Carver. She was surprised, she said, by his ”good manners.”
Carver was in his 80s. He had made a $10,000 stake shooting buffalo for the government on the Great Plains. A ”certain lady” he met thereafter persuaded him to use the money for education. So he became a dentist. Getting to be a doctor would take too long, he reckoned.
Then he joined a traveling Wild West show as a sharpshooter, challenging the locals to outshoot him and winning every time. Another ”certain lady”
caught his attention, and that led to the diving horses.
”Daddy Carver said he was seeing this lady, who lived on the other side of the Platte River. One night, some of his friends played a trick on him and took the boards out of the middle of the bridge. He and the horse went right into the river. That gave him the idea.”
So Daddy Carver trained some horses to dive and hit the road again. In Savannah, he decided the act needed a girl rider.
”I spoke with him and said I had no interest in doing this. That night, a Friday, I had a date. A boy took me to the fair, and we watched the horse dive. I asked this boy whether he would do that, and he asked me if I thought he was crazy. Well, that`s when I decided to try it.”
Sonora joined the troupe, and Carver`s son, Al, helped her learn to ride the plunging equines. Four years later, Al asked her to marry him.
”He said he had loved me since the first time we met in Savannah. I had no idea. He certainly kept it hidden for quite a while.”
In the movie, Al proposes before a Steel Pier crowd while introducing her act over the public-address system.
”It didn`t happen that way,” Sonora Carver said, smiling at a private recollection. ”But that`s all right.”
So they traveled, and she dived on her horses at country fairs and carnivals all over the country and enjoyed herself thoroughly. Then, in 1929, the show landed a steady booking in Atlantic City. Two years later came the dive that caused her blindness.
”The horse made a bad jump, coming straight down at the water. I got a good smack in the face when I hit the water. After that, my vision began to gradually go. They tried an operation, but it didn`t work.”
When she got out of the hospital, it was back to work. This did not strike her as strange or particularly heroic. She just did it.
”This was a really good, steady engagement, one that lasted right up until the war years. During this time we had three units working, one in Atlantic City and two on the road. I worked mostly at Steel Pier. My favorite jumpers were Red Lips and John the Baptist.”
The Carver outfit was the only diving horse show that lasted for any length of time, she said.
”We heard there was a show down in Houston, and went to see it. We had a copyright on the diving horses and figured we could sue to stop that show. But after we saw it, we decided not to bother. It was so bad, we figured public opinion would get rid of it quicker than the law. And that`s what happened.” She laughs, recalling that show. The horses, she said, were led onto a ramp over the water and actually fell, rather than dove.
”They were landing on their sides and everything. It was awful.”
Horses in the Carver show were not subjected to such indignities, she said.
Demand for the show evaporated with the coming of World War II, and Al and Sonora Carver moved to New Orleans. Al got a job at a synthetic-rubber plant, and Sonora, who had taken business courses through the years, found work as a typist. All that remained of the diving horses and that part of their lives was contained in a few scrapbooks, which were taken out from time to time and mused over, like old love letters. Al died several years ago, and she began thinking about moving back to New Jersey, where she has family.
Then, in 1982, the moviemakers came along with their proposition.
”When I finally decided to let them do it,” she said, ”they offered me a certain amount of money. I told them it wasn`t enough, and when they agreed to pay me what I wanted, the project went ahead.”
She was invited out to California for a screening of ”Wild Hearts Can`t Be Broken.”
”I enjoyed meeting the little girl who plays me (Gabrielle Anwar), and I enjoyed hearing the movie. It`s a good movie, really. It`s not exactly accurate about some of the details, but it`s a good movie.”
